Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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Father asked whether he might work among the Bushmen kept prisoners at the Breakwater. He had discovered, however, that the surroundings of prison were by no means helpful in persuading these people to talk. He asked whether it might be possible to allow some of the Bushmen to work for our family, so that he could interview them in the peace of our own home at Mowbray. This was approved by Sir Philip [Wodehouse, the governor], and we then had a few of them as servants. You can imagine that a Bushman, who has not even learnt to live in a house, and who knows nothing about cultivating soil, did not make a particularly good house-boy, but this did not worry Father. What he wanted was to hear their language (Rosenthal & Goodwin 1953:12f).
Bleek’s first informant was a young man called |A!kungta, who was soon joined by ||Kabbo, a much older man. In the ‘Report of Dr. Bleek concerning his researches into Bushman language and customs, presented to the ... House of Assembly ...’ of 1873, Bleek wrote of these informants:
Both are still with me. Their term of penal servitude expired in the middle of the year 1871 and they have since remained of their own free will. In order to achieve the object of these enquiries (a thorough knowledge of the Bushman language and literature) the presence of these men (or other Bushmen) is necessary for several years; at least four; two and a half of which have already expired.
What has been written down from the lips of the Bushmen, consists of more than four thousand columns (half pages quarto) of text, besides a dozen genealogical tables, and other genealogical, geographical, and astrological, &c, notices (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 443f).
In October 1873 these informants returned to their homes near the Strontbergen in the northern Cape (lat. 30 S., long. 22 E.), but in the following months were replaced by ǂKasing and Dia!kwain from the Katkop Mountains north of Calvinia. In June 1874 !Kweiten ta liken, ǂKasing’s wife and Dia!kwain’s sister, and her children also came to Bleek’s house at Mowbray. In 1875 Bleek wrote in his second report:
The amount of native Bushman literature collected, has increased since our last report from more than 4,000 to about 6,000 half-pages or columns (in seventy-seven volumes of quarto); of which more than one-third has been written down by myself. A large portion of these Bushman texts has been translated with the aid of the narrators.
In a footnote Bleek added:
As the printing of this report (handed to the Government in February last) has, through press of business been delayed to the present month (May), we are able to state that the total amount of Bushman native literature collected is now about 7,200 half-pages, in eighty-four volumes (W.H.I. Bleek 1875b: 5).
During this period, Bleek was still working at the Grey Library and leaving the collection of |Xam oral literature mainly to Lucy C. Lloyd, his wife’s sister. Indeed, the major part of the total collection was made by Lloyd, while Bleek worked on compiling a dictionary of the language and studying the grammar.
In August 1875 Bleek died, at the early age of 48, having been troubled with very poor health for many years. Lloyd was then appointed to the staff of the South African Public Library, Cape Town, editing material collected by Bleek. However, with the aid of other informants, she continued the work of collecting San texts until 1884. In 1887 she retired to North Wales and later Berlin. In 1889 a ‘Third report concerning Bushman researches, presented to both Houses of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope ...’ was published by Lloyd under the title, A Short Account of Further Bushman Material Collected (Lloyd 1889). This report followed the format of Bleek's second report and contained, in fact, a very detailed account of everything that had been collected since that date. This, like Bleek’s report, provided an inventory not only of the oral literature, but also of the very many texts that dealt with customs and beliefs, and other matters of ethnographic interest. Together, Bleek’s report of 1875 and Lloyd's of 1884 form a published index to all of the material collected between 1870 and 1884, a collection that amounts to some 13,000 pages of text and folio sheets.14
In 1911 Lloyd published a selection of the collected material in a volume entitled Specimens of Bushman Folklore (Bleek & Lloyd 1911) which contained |Xam texts and translations. An appendix to Specimens of Bushman Folklore also contains a few !Kung texts gathered by Lloyd between 1879 and 1882 from two adolescents from the northeast of Damaraland. This volume was the first major publication of the collected material. Lucy Lloyd died in 1914, after which Bleek’s daughter, Dorothea Bleek, who had been only two years old when her father died, took up the task of publishing parts of the collection, as well as carrying out fresh research into other San groups and their languages.
In 1910 Dorothea Bleek made the first of her many expeditions when she visited the surviving |Xam living near Prieska. She later wrote:
In 1910 and 1911 when I travelled through Prieska and Kenhardt districts, I found just a handful of old people left here and there, some of them relatives of our former men. From them and from the farmers whose parents had settled here in the sixties, I received corroboration of what our Bushmen had told long before (D.F. Bleek 1923: viii).
She had already studied |Xam life and languages under her aunt, Lucy Lloyd, and helped in the preparation of Specimens of Bushman Folklore. In 1923 she published Mantis and His Friends (ibid.) containing translations of a number of narratives collected by her father and Lucy Lloyd concerning the trickster |Kaggen. Other original works were also published by her in the following years, but between 1931 and 1936 she edited a series of texts entitled ‘Customs and beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen; from material collected by Dr. W.H.I. Bleek and Miss L.C. Lloyd between 1870 and 1880’, which appeared in the journal Bantu Studies.15
In 1936 she also published, in the same journal, a further selection of the material, this time of narratives and fragments of narratives with texts, entitled ‘Special speech of animals and moon used by the |Xam Bushmen’.16 Apart from these publications of the collections, Dorothea Bleek also published part of a |Xam grammar (D.F. Bleek 1929c); an account of |Xam kinship terms (D.F. Bleek 1924); a volume of copies of rock paintings made by G.W. Stow together with a commentary by her containing interpretations and comments on the copies by her father's informants (Bleek & Stow 1930); and a good but brief sketch of |Xam oral literature in a paper called ‘Bushman folklore’ (D.F. Bleek 1929a). Finally, A Bushman Dictionary by Dorothea Bleek was published in 1956, eight years after her death, based on the work of many writers, including her father, Lucy Lloyd and her own researches (D.F. Bleek 1956).
The oral literature collected by Bleek and Lloyd comprises approximately one hundred different narratives, many of them in several versions; nearly eighty very short songs; and a few formal addresses to supernatural entities. Eleven of the songs were published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, and a further selection, together with their melodies written down in musical notation, was published in ‘A study of Bushman music’ by Percival Kirby in 1936 (Kirby 1936a). Recent printed publications of parts of the collection include most notably David Lewis-Williams’ Stories that Float from Afar, mentioned above, and Neil Bennun’s The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People.17
The texts were taken down by hand, sometimes by Bleek, more often by Lloyd. These were later roughly translated with help of the informants, most of whom spoke English and Afrikaans. In some cases the job of translation was left to a much later date, when other informants assisted in the translation, and a few of the texts were never translated. This process was excavated in detail in Andrew Bank’s Bushmen in a Victorian World. Bleek and Lloyd had six main informants, five men – |A!kungta, ||Kabbo, ǂKasing, Dia!kwain and |Hang ǂkass’o – and one woman – !Kweiten ta ||ken. In addition to these, a few other informants assisted the collectors for brief periods. |A!kungta was with Bleek and Lloyd from August 1870 until October 1873; ||Kabbo from February 1871 until October 1873; Dia!kwain from December 1873 until March 1876; and ǂKasing from November 1873 until January 1875, when he left with his wife, !Kweiten ta ||ken, who had been at Mowbray since June 1874. |Hang ǂkass’o assisted Miss Lloyd from January 1878 until December 1879.
With the exception of |A!kungta, these informants were from two families. Dia!kwain, his sister !Kweiten ta ||ken and her husband ǂKasing were all from the Katkop Mountains,